6 month old baby...catnapping hell

[Sassy14]

Hi everyone,

My 6 month old baby is so used to sleeping on me during daytime naps and would sleep very well (also slept good at night in crib with 1-2 feeds throughout the night) but I'm trying to break the cycle of her using me to nap on during her daytime naps. I'm going back to work soon and need her to get used to this. I've tried everything but when she goes down in her next to me crib (I still stay with her) she will NOT sleep for more than 30-35 mins every time! I've tried everything, a dark room, white noise etc and nothing works.

Because she doesn't nap longer than 30 mins really, the whole rest of the day she is cranky and overtired.

Please help, I don't know what to do! Thank you x

This probably isn’t what you want to hear but mine wouldn’t nap longer than 40 minutes until she was 1 although people do sometime say it coincides with them becoming mobile and my DD was a very late crawler/Walker.

She would only sleep longer if she was being pushed in the pram but she had to actually be moving outside, I couldn’t just pop her in and rock her to sleep and then leave her there.

Friends would talk about these 2-3 hour naps their babies were having and everything they got done in that time... I had nothing of the sort! And was knackered from taking her on walks to try to get her to sleep longer.

Some of them are just rubbish nappers. Sorry!

My 2 dc only ever slept for 30 mins (almost to the dot) during the day and both dropped naps at 20 months. Any nap after that would mean not going down until 10/11pm.
Good luck, I hope you crack it! My dc are now teens and are always asleep! 😝

DD still only sleeps for 30 ish mins at home, and she's 14 months. She just has more naps than the books say she should, and it's fine.

She has looooong sleeps at nursery though, no idea what voodoo they use to achieve it.

Hi Sassy, mine was the same. Would do 2-3 hours easily in the sling, 30-45 mins in the cot. We had to persist as I went back to work at 6 months and my little one was being looked after by her grandparents one day a week who could most definitely not have carted her about in the sling for 3 hours (never mind the 20 minute speed walk round the house to get her to drop off in the first place!). We just pushed on and after about a month from what I remember she started linking two sleep cycles together to do more like an hour/hour and a half, after about another month she'd sleep as long in the cot as she did in the sling. The overtiredness was PAINFUL though so I really sympathise. Like a PP I'd recommend just more naps - concentrate on awake windows rather than number of naps and as they gradually sleep longer the awake windows reduce. Good luck - this issue caused me so much stress (the HV actually came out to me god love her after I called in floods of tears) but for mine anyway it really was just a case of getting her used to it.

Hi, yes 30 minute napper here. I always put him in his cot (so I could eat mainly) and he had 3 a day at that age, the last one ending before 4 so he’d go to bed at 6.30.

He slept well at night thankfully, so I clung to my sanity.

He extended his morning nap of his own accord at about 10 months, and eventually had an hour am and an hour pm, and at 15 months we moved to the two hour lunchtime nap, which is nothing short of magical!

I thought it would never happen, but it did.
I remember being out for coffee with the other mums and they’d all have peaceful sleeping babies in their prams, while mine was writhing around on my knee ensuring I got absolutely no moments to relax lol.

Ooh and you've probably tried this already but just in case, I would treat an overtired early wake like I would a night wake - so as you say dark, white noise but also feed/dummy replacement if needed and then for us it would be rhythmic pat on the bum and singing/shushing (whatever works for you). It just reinforces that yes you might be a bit awake but that does not mean it's getting up time! Think this probably had about a 40% success rate in getting her to drop back off each time but I think overall it helped her to realise that just because she had stirred between sleep cycles it doesn't automatically mean it's getting straight up time, it's time to at least try to drop back off but if you can't manage it hey ho kind of thing.

Never got my DD out of catnaps and I tried EVERYTHiNG. She eventually took longer naps of her own accord from 14 months. Sorry about the overtiredness, it’s awful isn’t it!

Thanks so much everyone for your advice.

So did everybody just keep putting their baby down for more naps during the day to total the 3-3.5 hours of day sleep?

She currently can't nap without me in the room so I already feel like I'm sitting in the bedroom all day and then I'm in there all night aswell

At the moment I've been letting her try to nap and see how long she goes in the crib by herself and then I'm letting her nap on me the rest of the 1hr - 1hr 30 mins because otherwise she's so overtired all day but I know I'm not breaking the cycle by doing that.
I've tried helping her through to another sleep cycle whilst in the crib by stroking her etc when she starts to stir but it never works and she just wakes up!
I'm really stuck on what to do for the best!

Hi there, oh it is so hard. Yes we put her down after the awake window expired so it meant more naps when the naps were shorter- I remember feeling like I spent forever in her bedroom! It got better after a bit when she started linking sleep cycles together.

The other thing that really helped us was a sleepyhead. They can be used safely for daytime sleep and they really help with that feeling of still being held when they stir, in our experience anyway (to be totally honest we used ours at night as well)... everyone feels differently about them and totally appreciate if they're not for you, but ours was a bit of a game changer!